Performance of MPEG-4 Transmission over SCTP Multi-Streaming in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol for the next generation Internet. SCTP is a connection-oriented protocol that carries over TCP's features but also supports UDP-like message-oriented data transmission. In this paper, we make use of SCTP's multi-streaming feature to transmit MPEG-4 video efficiently, and evaluate its transmission performance under the policy with/without differentiated retransmission. Moreover, to enhance the communication quality, we extend SCTP multi-streaming to realize selective retransmission policy. Our extension utilizes packet-by-packet timestamps to control retransmission of lost packets. By computer simulation, we show that SCTP can (1) improve the video quality by exploiting the multi-streaming and partial reliability features, (2) enhance the video transmission quality by adjusting SCTP fast retransmit threshold, and (3) SCTP with our selective retransmission extension can further improve the whole performance.